Lookstat published some interesting analysis of aggregated sales results across all their users on their blog, some of it was no surprise / confirmation of what we can already see, but the upward trend in earnings per download is indeed nice to behold.

Crestock launched a their 'freebie images' wordpress plugin to insert watermarked images into blogs free of charge. Images come from crestock contributors who opted-in to the service in return for a 5% increase in royalties on images sold. The plugin can be obtained from freebieimages.com. It's good marketing for all crestock contributors if it attracts new buyers to the site, I'm not certain that it's the best implementation. Unlike similar services (like picapp as mentioned above) the image is downloaded and hosted on the end users blog, leaving them free (against the terms of use of course) to remove the hyperlink and the text credit from the image leaving just the watermark in place, hence defeating the goal to direct customers to crestock via direct clicks and search engine ranking. Something more like the tools tab at dreamstime that provides cut-and-paste code (watermarked and not designed for the same purpose I admit) would afford the agency more control over it's media, and I think would be a lot easier for all to use. Wordpress is popular but certainly not the only blogging platform, keeping the image hosted at the agencies site is a more expensive option but allows better control if that image needs to be removed for any reason, and allows users of any platform or forum to post images. It's an interesting marketing approach, clearly picapp think they can make a viable business from it (with ad support). Fotolia have also been recruiting top bloggers to use their images as part of a marketing campaign, which you can read a case study about. Community opinion about crestock freebieimages on microstockgroup.

I removed albumo from our listings, it seems to have gone to microstock heaven sometime around the end of last month, but as I wasn't uploading to them so I didn't notice the exact date.

More Plugins: Fotolia made it easier for buyers to access stock images directly from within Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 and Word 2007 with a ribbon add-in. news release. More information from fotolia and download the 'ribbon'.

Fotolia must have taken some PR delight in welcoming photographer Jim DeLillo into their fold after he cancelled his istock exclusivity press release.

Dreamstime announced they would be doing some database cleaning. Images over 3 or 4 years old without sales would at the choice of the contributor be either removed, offered for re-keywording or placed into the free section. dreamstime forum.

"Dreamstime announced they would be doing some database cleaning. Images over 3 or 4 years old without sales would at the choice of the contributor be either removed, offered for re-keywording or placed into the free section. dreamstime forum." That Dreamstime is setting themselves up to be the next to offer the guarantee. It will be interesting to hear from people if images are deleted that are not ones that haven't been downloaded.

That was my thought too, it came out on the same day announced a something vague on twitter "3 or 4 years" so they could clarify later when they had had a think about the details?, you could guess before that 3 or 4 years ago limit DT had a less strict policy (as I think all of the older micros) so all those images now need manual review. Or it could just be coincidence! I know istock have been cracking down even after their announcement, I had an un-model released image of a hand removed (no tatoos or anything obvious either), there was a time that you could include someone facing away from the camera without MR - not now!

I do think that all of this even with 'editorial' image options leaves lots of images that could be sold for certain purposes 'documentary, travel' etc out of the loop, not really what you could call editorial and certainly not RF. There a 10,000s of images languishing as 'free' or 'creative commons' because they contain something that might, perhaps at a long stretch of the imagination cause some legal problem but I think someone understanding the subject would like to make fair use of and pay for the privilege of not including an attribution. I was looking at a clustershot port yesterday with 1000's of images of old neon signs, all for sale for 300 USD, these would be rejected for micro, rf and editorial I think? actually come to think of I've just described a big part of alamys RM collection!

I totally didn't see this earlier :( After writing my November newsletter I thought that I haven't seen any posts from here lately in my RSS feed. I just got that fixed so it is going into the feed properly and see you have done a nice 'events of October' list. I am sorry I missed linking it in the newsletter. Next month!

Monthly updates: well I tend to post them when I have enough things that didn't merit a full news post so they don't come every month (although they have recently), and the last few have come mid month too - that might not be a bad thing when there's lot's happening at the end of the month. So of now I'm sticking to mid month but don't want to become tied to it for times when I'm travelling etc.

perhaps this is taking an off topic turn here but... Clicking on the RSS button in the address bar, or just adding your URL to google reader just gave me a blank RSS feed. Or perhaps better said, good was unable to find the RSS feed. I think that is what I must have done last time I tried to add it. This time (after trying the wrong way 2x) I found the subscribe button in the right bar that seemed to work (when I added the address from there)